“We don’t have to agree with the authorities on everything”1 Naguib Sawirès, businessman, second richest person in Egypt, February 2017.
While, as we saw in the previous chapter, international organizations are influencing national policies in the media sector, the Arab States remain sovereign and “liberalizations” remain constrained, to use a euphemism. Indeed, the development of the Arab media system has been quite closely controlled by governments, driven by international, regional and national factors of various kinds – economic, political and cultural. This commitment has been multifaceted: in terms of infrastructure, the media themselves (creation of new channels and newspapers, less conservative content, etc.), regulation and taxation, and finally by opening up the media to the private sector. But before returning to the government’s role, it is important to reflect on actors who from now on are unavoidable: businessmen. The latter, who have become essential to the expansion – sometimes to the survival – of the media, are the obliged partners of political decision-makers in the context of the opening of this sector to the market. Finally, it is both the government and business people who drive the media, although the media confluence that will be discussed at the end of this chapter is also fueled and defined by the media users themselves.
If we look at the regional scene and transnational media, businessmen have been present in the media sector since the early 1990s. At the government level, it was especially during the 2000s that their rise began both in the Maghreb and in the countries of the Middle East. Before that time (we base this chapter on a study of the Egyptian case), the media was primarily perceived as an economic sector open to certain actors for certain types of programs. According to the Egyptian case, it was appropriate to be close to the government, and to not have any political ambition: television broadcasts and more general involvement in the sector should, as a general rule, be entertainment, with a few rare exceptions – such as the political talk shows of journalistic figures such as Hamdy Quandil and Emad Eddin Adeeb – on the condition, however, that a red line relating to the President and his family would never be crossed. In all cases, the businessmen involved were company managers concerned above all with the growth of their groups. For the press, which is very largely dominated by public media, such as television, the participation of private actors was a necessity, since journalists do not have the right to own their media.
From the 2000s, with the beginning of a political opening that lasted until the middle of the decade, new arrivals began to flow in (Della Ratta et al. 2015). All have carefully avoided direct confrontation with the regime; however, we cannot isolate one archetypal figure of the “businessman” who would be devoid of any ethical sense and whose only concern would be to enrich themselves further in contact with a totalitarian government in a bond of pure clientelism. The reality is more complex. We can isolate five criteria that have proven relevant to classify businessmen in Egypt: are they businessmen or entrepreneurs? Are they media professionals? Are they heirs in the Bourdieuian sense of the word? Do they have an explicit, identifiable political commitment? And finally, do they have a strong political ambition, for themselves or for their media(s)? (Guaaybess 2015).
The first category includes businessmen stricto sensu: they have already made their fortune in one or more sectors other than the media, own and manage industrial conglomerates, and most are heirs whose wealth was built in their parents’ time. They have often come to the media “late”, more out of a desire to own a medium than to increase their wealth. They have no formal political commitment and have conducted their business neither with nor against power, sparing it out of necessity, but without excessive zeal. These include Naguib Sawires (Orascom Telecom), Salah Diab (Pico group, active in agriculture, construction, energy), Ahmad Bahgat (Bahgat group – although his relationship with H. Mubarak has been more ambiguous) and Hassan Rateb. Sawires, Diab and Bahgat were at the origin of the creation, in 2004, of the daily newspaper Al Masry Al Youm, which was the first independent daily newspaper published in Egypt and was relatively sustainable during the Mubarak era. In this first group of businessmen, one stands out from the others: Sayyid Al Badawi. He is a true businessman who made a fortune in the pharmaceutical industry, but he is not an heir, and was president of a political party (the Wafd party). He owned the weekly Al Dostour – while dismissing its energetic editor, Ibrahim Issa – and unlike the others, his financial power served the interests of the government. His intervention – buying out a media that was too independent – illustrated the most common form of censorship now practiced: economic censorship. To put it simply: power censors itself without compromising itself. This strategy of political decision-makers is not specific to Egypt; for example, it will be found in Morocco (Benslimane 2015; Benchenna et al. 2017). During and after the 2011 revolution, the political position of billionaire Naguib Sawiris2 was more explicit, much more liberal than the cliché we could have had, with the creation of the OnTV channel in particular, a profile similar to that of Salah Diab, who continued the venture of Al Masry Al Youm, despite the legal difficulties he has experienced since Abdel Fatta el Sisi’s ascension to power. There was also a reversal of fortune for Sawiris, whose OnTV channel was bought in 2012 by a businessman who would have in our classification a profile close to Sayyid Al Badawi, in that his financial power, as great as it was sudden, would be one of the occasional arms of the government apparatus – Ahmed Abu Hashima (recent fortune in steel). Suleiman Amer, who bought Tahrir TV – the channel set up by, among others, freelance journalist Ibrahim Eissa in February 2011 – could also be classified in this category.
The second category includes media professionals: they are not heirs, and they have no explicit political ambition even though they may have played a role in political communication (or talk shows), but they have made a fortune in the media sector. These include Tarek Nour (at least until the end of the Mubarak era; then the positioning was more unclear), Ibrahim El Moallem (publishing, press) and Emad Eddin Adeeb (star talk-show host, founder of Good News Media Group).
The third category, emerging in the era of the revolution, is that of media men – entrepreneurs – who, having no major economic interests to defend, have ambitions for the media they establish or direct other than entertainment. For them, the media are not financial or political enterprises designed to increase their economic power or establish their political influence in the service of the regime, but institutions with a role to play in the service of freedom of expression and social development. Two men have distinguished themselves: Hisham Kassem and Ibrahim Eissa. For a time, they associated themselves with certain businessmen in the first category – heirs whose wealth owes very little to the regime in place, who have no ambition and have had no political role, and who have proved themselves through the experience of discreet but convinced defenders of freedom of expression. Hisham Kassem3 is the founder, in 1996, of the Cairo Times, banned from publication in Egypt at the time, recruited by Salah Diab and Naguib Sawiris to lead Al Masri Al Youm in 2004. Ibrahim Eissa, for his part, is the man of the free weekly Al Dostour – relaunched in 2005 – until his dismissal because of his tendency to give voice to the most troublesome opposition for the government, the Muslim Brotherhood. This third typology struggled to find its way under Mubarak, but it nevertheless succeeded in establishing, over a relatively short period of time, a way of operating in the sector that was more respectful of the principles of freedom of expression and pluralism.
Unfortunately, as far as the media are concerned, while President Morsi’s era has been a real challenge for the development of such profiles – the only one capable of building a plural media system – the Sisi era has put a stop to plans for real liberalization in the sector. If we return for a moment to WSIS, the vision of the media conveyed by Kassem and Eissa is close to some of the ideals of WSIS (freedom of the press). But their fate shows, 15 years after the summit, and at the end of an undeniable modernization and sophistication of the Arab media system (as shown by the statistics in the figures in Chapter 3), that there can be no technological determinism in the media sector. Freedom – like economic development – does not naturally result from a modern infrastructure and wide access to ICT in general and digital media in particular.
As in the Mubarak era, it is crucial to dissociate political liberalism from economic openness because it is indeed private businessmen who, like one Ahmed Abu Hashima, replace the government to confiscate from other businessmen a space of expression considered too wide by the ruling elites and in accordance with a legally painless mode of censorship. But the businessmen of this second wave, like those whom they replace, have their own political objectives that do not necessarily appear at first sight, and with which the government will have to deal at one time or another.
Thus, a new public–private balance is being established, moving, for almost two decades now, for the reasons we have mentioned above, and in particular, due to the fact that the financial constraints of governments no longer allow them to assume alone the burden of the heavy investments required. This need leads them to comply with the recommendations of international financial institutions, which call for real participation of the private sector in the implementation of government strategies in the sector. This balance is achieved at the political and economic levels, which are intrinsically linked – the media field is the best indicator of this. Television, like radio, was indeed a media organically linked to power, from the utopias displayed in the post-independence years on its role in social development. One of the reasons for this is its power to focus attention – or its very strong power to spread messages. Everyone has access to television, everywhere, regardless of their level of education or wealth, and the same message is received by everyone at the same time. Thus, any questioning of its status (new investors, introduction of new media, reform of the regulatory body, new regulations, etc.) de facto meant a change in the way in which power was exercised, since it would then accept that alternative voices would benefit from this unequalled broadcasting power. Thus, television, like the media field in general, is an effective prism for analyzing the degree of political openness that governments are willing to concede. In other words, there is a structural homology – or correspondence – between the political field and the media field (Bourdieu 1989).
The political nature of the national audiovisual media as a medium is not only linked to what is happening at the national level. The Arab governments were also caught up in a regional dynamic where the reforms of some became constraints or opportunities for others, forcing change in any case. The challenge was then to find the subtle balance between, on the one hand, the degree of reforms necessary to stay in the game and not lose the public (and advertising revenues), and, on the other hand, maintaining the domestic political status quo. Reforms began in the 1990s with the emergence of satellite channels and networks and the launch of direct broadcasting satellites by Egypt in particular. Then came the relocation of production and filming sites from Europe to Arab countries, with the creation of free media zones, which were another area of competition between Arab countries (Khalil 2013). Finally, it was the turn of the regulatory and supervisory authorities to reform themselves in the 2000s.
But heavy and bureaucratic organizations are not changed by decree. It is not enough simply to decide on a new mode of television governance; it is a question of taking a complex institution – embedded in society and politics – out of a trajectory and inertia in which it has been caught since its creation. The path dependence paradigm is very useful for understanding the difficulties that a government (e.g. Egyptian) may face in its reform efforts.
Path dependence is a concept on the edge of economics and political science, which is very useful for understanding media structures. It makes it possible to explain, at a very general level, organizational choices that are not optimal. In essence, to take up Leibowitz and Margolis (Leibowitz and Margolis 2000), “history matters” in the sense that past choices constrain future policies, an idea also developed by Palier and Bonoli (1999) in their public policy analysis. Reforms are always constrained by an established pattern and any radical change becomes difficult to implement because of the inertia induced by this path dependence. Several causes explain path dependence (we present the analysis made for a company, but the connections are quite applicable to the analysis of a media system). One of the main reasons is what are called increasing profits (or gains); a choice becomes all the more profitable if it is made on a recurring basis. Paul Pierson (1997) identifies four cases where there are increasing benefits. The first is related to high fixed costs: when fixed costs are high, it seems appropriate to continue investing in a given technology, as the idea is close to economies of scale. The second concerns the learning effects and the growing know-how that encourages a company to assume a choice over a long period of time. The third relates to coordination effects: the benefits that a company derives from the use of a technology are significant if other companies adopt the same technology (e.g. because the market is growing). The fourth case where path dependence can be observed is that of “adaptive expectations”, where one company tries to anticipate the choices of other companies to adapt, in which case its decisions will be linked to the choices (actual and anticipated) of many other companies – change becomes very slow.
In the Egyptian case, the signs of path dependence are, for example, large-scale industrial projects such as the launch of satellites that were initially largely oversized. They are the continuation of very ambitious policies pursued since the radio in the 1950s and reflect the strategic nature of the sector for the government, which does not want to give the impression of giving up ground (on neither a domestic nor a regional scale), even though it means incurring clearly disproportionate expenses, which will incur the following expenses, since the logic is unchanged. There is also an economic constraint linked to the high fixed costs of setting up a media infrastructure (satellites, ground infrastructure, free zones, new channels adapted to the satellite coverage area, etc.): these fixed costs are a burden on often fragile government budgets and must be amortized before an alternative policy can be considered. The third scenario discussed above is that of coordination effects: transposed to the media sector, this gives the emulation, or competition, that exists between the different Arab governments that target the same audience via homogeneous technological choices (satellite channels launched by many governments). The growing gains here are constituted by advertising revenues, which are all the more important because they come from a vast – pan-Arab – market covered by the same technology. These gains can also be political in the sense of political (or ideological) influence, especially since a large number of countries have integrated satellite technology to relay these messages. Adaptive expectations can finally emerge if governments take into account, in their efforts, the reform of the supposed or declared intentions of their neighbors: they then try to reform neither more (why take risks?) nor less (not to be overtaken) than other governments, which favors trajectory dependence or strong determinism in the evolution of the media sectors. Change is not a deliberate choice, but a strategic reaction, sometimes defensive and sometimes offensive, to the actions of other governments.
Government policies, despite being constrained in the sense described above, have made it possible to modernize the media sectors in most Arab countries. One aspect of this modernization is the increasing complexity of media systems. As infrastructure and society evolves – with the widespread availability of Internet access, followed by the arrival of broadband, including mobile broadband, lower access costs and the availability of low-cost phones4 – the emergence of digital media has been a natural step in the evolution of Arab media systems. The awareness of the world that mobile digital media had spread to the Arab world coincided with the revolutions of 2010–2011. It was as sudden as it was exalted, to such an extent that many observers attributed the revolutions to the young people registered on social networks alone – and quickly noted the end of television and other traditional media. The analysis of the Egyptian case shows that digital media have indeed integrated into and enriched the existing media system, and that the 2011 revolts were the result of this integration when it responded to strong and profound changes within civil society (involving the political opposition, trade unions, youth movements, etc.).
We have referred to this phenomenon of integration as media confluence (Guaaybess 2011). Media confluence is a concept that makes it possible to overcome the idea of “digital convergence” which, at the time in vogue, was too simplistic because it implied the miscibility of existing media in the digital world. The media confluence makes it possible to reflect the progressive interweaving of the media one into the other, within a complete system allowing the coexistence of several formats and several media. Digital media have their own uses and production methods, which make it possible to establish this interdependence with and between existing media. But traditional media continue to exist with their specificities (uses and production methods): none of the existing media appear miscible in the digital world (Guaaybess 2011, p. 11). The media confluence that we are advancing for the contemporary period actually makes it possible to describe and give meaning to the past evolution of the media. As the new media of the time (radio, television, etc.) never chased away or replaced the old ones, they strengthened – rather than weakened – the existing media systems. This paradigm is similar in many ways to the concept of “cultural convergence” developed by Henry Jenkins (2013), even though the major challenge in our opinion is the visibility of certain subjects in the media, when Jenkins’ work places greater emphasis on the anthropological dimension of media convergence, which he associates with participatory culture and collective intelligence.
The confluence of the media, with its emphasis on production methods and uses, highlights the fact that format and media are not interchangeable concepts. The press (media) can be printed on paper or digital (format); but an online journal remains a journal and cannot be confused with a blog or social network. The same goes for television, which remains television even though its format and mode of accessibility change. Beyond the question of uses and production methods, the media are also distinguished by their temporality and scope5. One easily observable constant: all media – including the press, which is the oldest – have survived all announced revolutions. It is good that they each have a role to play and a more or less stable audience over the decades.
Digital media in the media confluence nevertheless have a strong specificity: the audience becomes a full-fledged player on the communication market. It is no longer possible to ignore it. To remain on a “pre-revolutionary” political ground, if bloggers, or even Internet users in general, do not have the institutional or social foundation of major news channels or newspapers, they do have the capacity to mobilize a network that can go far beyond national borders, to “find” information of primary importance quickly and in various formats. The facts that they report may, if verified and reported by the mass media, exert pressure on the public opinion concerned and encourage action. By making themselves available on the Internet, the written and audiovisual media have moved closer together, on this medium only (Internet), and closer to their audience. The audience now has the ability to say what should or should not be read and what their likes or dislikes are, to explain why, to put forward arguments and to propose alternatives. The confluence makes it possible to report on a feedback phenomenon that links the different media together.
The television system, for its part, continued to evolve. Thus, after the proliferation of satellites and the emergence of hundreds of channels without real financial resources, often with neither the specialization nor the audience necessary to attract advertisers in the long term (and guarantee their sustainability), we have gradually witnessed the return of the local in productions. Once the novelty of Lebanese and Saudi entertainment channels, the uniformity of commercial formats and the Arabic-language versions of successful European games had passed, audiences once again favored content that spoke more to them (Khalil 2016). This began in the early 2000s with, for example, certain religious channels or conglomerates that did not replace the existing offer but enriched it. More or less rigid, their goal – or commercial strategy – is to reach a part of the population that is abandoned by traditional satellite productions; they do not only talk about religion, but also about family and traditional values. The return of the local in the form of greater consideration of the cultural specificities of the countries is also visible during the month of Ramadan – which is a peak time in terms of advertising revenue generation. The most popular programs are television series featuring characters and stories with which Arab audiences can identify. The return of the local is finally visible in the consideration of ethnic or linguistic minorities; this aspect is particularly evident in Morocco, with the launch of Berber channels (see, for example, Guaaybess 2012). Good news: this is in line with the recommendations of the World Summit on the Information Society.
Thus, the media and cultural offerings tend to meet the expectations of an audience that is known to be plural and diverse in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. We will see in the next chapter that Western representations of these audiences are more uniform.